Lessons from Building an Autonomous Research Agent
MicroResearch was an experiment in autonomous AI-driven research — agents that would iteratively propose changes to a given research problem, evaluate them, and keep what worked. It ran overnight. It failed spectacularly. But the failure taught me six principles that I now apply to every multi-agent system I build. 1. Clear Roles, Clear Scope The MicroResearch failure taught me something uncomfortable: I had given the research agents the same tool access as the main agent. Full file system, full messaging, full session spawning. The only thing constraining them was a markdown file saying “please don’t do these things.” ...